Sony E-Commerce journey UX prototype

To establish a better experience for mobile and tablet users, we, that is the UX team I worked in at Sony from 2010-2014, devised a prototype for the E-Commerce journey. Roughly translated, it meant re-building the current store with a easier to use interface, behaving responsive on smaller screens and adding a lefthand navigation with a facteted filter search to make choosing between the various options of a specific category much more user-friendly. Improving user experience with the already established frontend framework and design guidelines.

After drawing this out on paper and Axure by our team and the people from Namahn, I was tasked with building an actual prototype, with real HTML and CSS and real pictures, feature text and prices, that could at least cater for 2 different product categories, namely cameras and TVs, so a full week of user testing in a specialised user lab could be conducted. Using the old site and the new prototype on a either a regular desktop pc, a 10″ tablet and a smartphone to compare the way people navigate the journey in those different setups.

It was nice to get out of the regular campaign work for a while and get some deep insight and hands-on experience in how to build a modular, structured set of reusable blocks which were quickly adapted in each possible use case.

And it was also very interesting to see what kind of behaviour different types of people display in such a sort-of-real-world environment. And a challenge for me as well, because I not only had to take care of the technical filtering mechanism, the responsive behaviour as such, but also had to make sure there was no foul link in there which would throw the participants of the test on the wrong track. I must say, I was amazed how some people navigate on the web, both in a positive way as a negative.

Tom Hermans is a freelance webdesigner/developer with a great interest in technology, communication, arts & design and music. These are some of the websites, posters, logo's or other designs I produced, for various clients or companies I worked for.

Most sites are built with web standards, technologies like HTML5, PHP, CSS3 with WordPress as CMS. Last two years I tried to convince people also of the importance of mobile browsing and building their website according to the principles of future-proof responsive webdesign.